Read csv file in R with currency column as numeric

Another way could be setting conversion using setAs.
It was used in two (similar) question:

• Processing negative number in "accounting" formatR
• How to read a csv file where some numbers contain commas?

For your needs:

setClass("Currency")
setAs("character", "Currency",
    function(from) as.numeric(sub("$","",from, fixed=TRUE)))

contribs <- read.csv("path/to/file", colClasses=c(CTRIB_AMT="Currency"))

I'm not sure how to read it in directly, but you can modify it once it's in:

> A <- read.csv("~/Desktop/data.csv")
> A
  id   desc price
1  0  apple $1.00
2  1 banana $2.25
3  2 grapes $1.97
> A$price <- as.numeric(sub("\\$","", A$price))
> A
  id   desc price
1  0  apple  1.00
2  1 banana  2.25
3  2 grapes  1.97
> str(A)
'data.frame':   3 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ id   : int  0 1 2
 $ desc : Factor w/ 3 levels "apple","banana",..: 1 2 3
 $ price: num  1 2.25 1.97

I think it might just have been a missing escape in your sub. $ indicates the end of a line in regular expressions. \$ is a dollar sign. But then you have to escape the escape...

Yet another solution for a problem solved long time ago:

convertCurrency <- function(currency) {
  currency1 <- sub('$','',as.character(currency),fixed=TRUE)
  currency2 <- as.numeric(gsub('\\,','',as.character(currency1))) 
  currency2
}

contribs$CTRIB_AMT_NUM <- convertCurrency(contribs$CTRIB_AMT)